Todd Kleismit

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S: Today is July 29, 2010. My name is Phil Sager, and I will be giving an interview with Todd Kleismit, at the Ohio Historical Society, formerly an Army photojournalist during the Gulf War. This interview is being conducted here at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, Ohio as part of an oral history project by the Society to preserve the stories and experiences of service members and their family members for future generations. The recordings will be used for scholarly and educational purposes, as well as published on the Ohio Memory website. Thanks, Todd. I just want to start with some personal background, and could you tell me a little about you background? You know? Things about where you were born, and when and where you grew up, family, and so on.
K: Sure. I’m originally from Dayton, Ohio. I grew up in Dayton and graduated from Trotwood-Madison High School in 1988, and actually the day… the day that I graduated, joining the military was one of the furthest things from my mind, and just quickly, I decided it was very fortuitous that an Army recruiter called me just at the right time –from his perspective, I think – where I wasn’t so sure where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do, so I thought I would go in and humor the recruiter by going in and having a conversation with them. I went in and talked to him in the summer of ‘88, and said, “Well, you know, the military sounds interesting, but I’m really more interested in going to school and becoming a journalist.” And he said, “Did you know we had journalists in the Army?” And right there I said, “No, say more.” And then he did, and one conversation led to another, and before I knew it, I had more or less convinced myself that it was probably a good option for me at that time and that particular context. My parents were stunned. They had no idea, and my father is a former Marine, who after I told him the news that I was thinking about joining the Army – at that point I was pretty sure I was going to – and he said, “Well heck! The Navy called last week, and I said ‘He’s not interested in that.’” So it all happened rather quickly. So, I ended up joining the Army later that year in ‘88 when I was eighteen years old.
S: Wow. So, your family, were they pretty… I mean after they got over the shock and stun, were they pretty accepting of your decision?
K: Yeah. They were very supportive, and… as I said, at that particular point in time, I was contemplating which college to go to, and is that really my first choice, and is that really the right thing to do? Maybe I should have, you know, given this a lot more thought, maybe a year or two before this point in time. So, as I said, the recruiter called me at just that right time when I wasn’t quite sure which direction to go, and I thought I could spend a few years in the Military and help figure out what career path I ultimately want to take. So, that’s what I did. I looked at it as a vast change in my normal, everyday routine, and this would really set me on a different course, and give me time to figure out which profession and career that I ultimately wanted to pursue.
S: So you were saying before that you really hadn’t thought about the military prior to your contact with the recruiter. What were your impressions of the military before you started talking to him?
K: Well, I think I had a relatively positive impression of the armed services. It just wasn’t anything I had seriously considered, and so it was very much a learning experience when I talked to the recruiter at that time. The more I learned, the more I started to envision myself doing that, at least for a few years. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to make a full career out of it, but having the opportunity to do something totally different to earn some college money. I do very much value public service, and so those were all very attractive things to me. When I thought about it, I thought I could do this for a few years, still be in my early twenties and go to college with some experience under my belt, and that’s probably a pretty good option for me.
S: So after you talked with the recruiter, and he mentioned there was this program for journalism, how’d things go from there?
K: Well, apparently, and of course I was only eighteen at the time…I didn’t know…I think there was some skepticism about, “Oh, here comes another eighteen year old who wants to go and be a photo journalist in the Army.” Well boy, you know, that job is hard to come by. You’ll be lucky. You have to score at a certain level, and even if you do that, those jobs are pretty rare. I learned all this after I fell in love with the idea. So, it ended up working out in my favor where as we started to move down this path, I remember one of the Army sergeants at the time typing something into the computer, basically trying to tell me basically, “What would be your second choice if you weren’t a journalist?” Kind of preparing me if the job wasn’t available. I remember him typing something in and saying, “Wow. This is rare. This job is actually available. Im going to go ahead and secure this for you.” Typed it in and locked it in. And so, that, in my mind, was kind of set in concrete. Up to that point, I’m not sure if they could have convinced me to go in to be some other profession. So once that was done, to me that kind of locked it in, and then we ended up… I left for basic training then in November of ‘88. The way it works out is you go through basic training, and then following that, you then go to your school to learn the profession you are going into. I liked writing, but I didn’t really come in with a journalism background from high school or anything along those lines. So it really was a kind of learning from scratch once I finished basic training to go to the Defense Information School, where I learned the basics of journalism, and I really enjoyed it. It was challenging for me. I was eighteen. I was one of the younger people in my cohort. I had an excellent teacher and learned it…I think once I learned to write and how to take good photographs, it really stuck with me. There was a strong learning curve for me, but it all worked out for me in the end.
S: So you were in that program for how long?
K: Let’s see. I think I was at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. I'm not sure if that military installation is still open or not. This would have been spring of 1989. I believe the course—I don’t remember specifically—I’ll say it was something like twelve weeks, give or take.
S: And you had indicated this was after your basic training?
K: It was.
S: What was that experience like?
K: Basic training? I wouldn’t want to do it again; let’s put it that way. For an eighteen year old growing up in Dayton, Ohio, it was a complete culture change and definitely throws you for a loop. I was your typical eighteen year old where I had a girlfriend at the time, and I was used to hanging out and having fun at King’s Island and things of this nature—and probably sleeping in more than most people perhaps. Basic training is a little different than that. I will never forget them clanging the trash cans every morning for your first week at probably something like five A.M. or 0500, and as the old army commercial used to say, we do more by eight A.M. than most people do all day. Seemed pretty accurate to me at the time. Basic training was a big challenge for me. It’s one of those things where you certainly wouldn’t want to do it again, but I was glad and I guess somewhat proud that I had gotten through it. It was physically challenging, certainly was emotionally challenging. It certainly pushed me, and it was just a complete change from what I was accustomed to. I felt pretty good at the end of it, and I was hoping that the rest of my experience in the military would not be as challenging in any way. It was just a huge difference in what I was accustomed to.
S: How about influences or mentors – people that may have helped you during the course of your enlistment, either in terms of training, or journalism or photojournalism?
K: Looking back at my military experience, I think there was a mix of good examples and what to follow and looking up to some people who were supervisors or in my chain of command in some respects, and then there were a number of—I guess I’d say poor examples. I knew I didn’t want to do things the way this or that person did it, or things of that nature. But I’d say generally I'm more of a self-counseled person; there probably isn’t a big example of someone who mentored me or things along those lines. And I think that probably served me well to hit some of the bumps in the road and learn from experience. In fact, I remember one of my first assignments. I finished the basic journalism course. I was sent to Fort Hood, Texas, and it was a public affairs office. I was probably still eighteen at the time. And there was a military officer that needed someone to take photographs to help document something. This may have even been my first assignment, and I was eighteen. I forgot to load the camera, and I went around and took probably the equivalent of a roll of film. How mortified I was when I finished the assignment and opened up the camera and realized I hadn’t put film in there. So there were a lot of examples, where, that taught me a huge lesson. Certainly didn’t want to repeat things like that, so I learned very quickly to pay very close attention to detail and learn from those experiences, not repeat them. People that worked with me in the military would probably say that I was very good at what I did, but there were some bumps along the road for sure. I had a pretty good experience overall, and I probably wouldn’t have changed too many things—even that experience when I didn’t load up the camera. Of course, these days, it would be digital, so it wouldn’t have that problem.
K: Let’s move on to your periods of mobilization. What unit of the army were you a member of?
S: This was 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. At the time, I was in the public affairs office at the 13th Core Support Command. The acronym for that is COSCOM: 13th COSCOM. The public affairs unit—it’s a medium sized military unit. There were probably a dozen battalions as part of that unit. Basically when you’re stationed there, you are the newspaper journalist for that unit, so my usual routine at that point in time was to cover the activities going on in the 13th COSCOM at Fort Hood on a day to day basis. There were training exercises going on, or maybe there was some news activity. Certainly when Fort Hood began to mobilize for Desert Storm—at that point, it was Operation Desert Shield—there were some units that were called up, and that became a news activity for me. I went to take photographs, and I did news stories for the Fort Hood Sentinel Newspaper, which was a weekly newspaper. So that was my normal routine. At about the time when I learned that the first medical group—which was part of the 13th COSCOM—they were called up to deploy to Desert Shield at that time. I was attached the unit at that time, and they said, “Well, we need a photojournalist, and so you’re going over with us.” And at that point in time, I could see the pros and the cons, but you don’t really have much of a choice. So, you're called up, and you just salute and say, “Okay, when do I report?” I was twenty years old at that time. I think it was probably about two months from the time I was notified and the time that we ended up deploying, which was late October of 1990, so that was kind of the context in which that all happened very quickly. Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, the public discussion—if there was one—was the end of the Cold War. Are we going to have a war any time in the near future? Didn’t look likely at all. It seemed like one of the most unlikeliest things possible with the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism collapsing. At that time, to think about being deployed to war was—even though I was in the army obviously—seemed very remote. So this all happened quickly from August 2nd of 1990 when Iraq invaded to my deployment at the end of October, and I ended up in Saudi Arabia and Iraq just shy of six months.
S: So were there a lot of preparations involved in getting mobilized and up to speed, and across the ocean?
K: There were. There were a lot of preparations, and a lot of it was paperwork, vaccinations, meetings to get prepared: here’s what you need to take; here’s what you shouldn’t take with you, and preparing for being deployed into a different culture. So there was some time spent discussing the culture of the Middle East and what is acceptable, what is not. And in the context of being in the military, being deployed over there, the cultural changes. And as I mentioned, I remember going through a lot of vaccinations and filling out a lot of paperwork and just mentally preparing yourself, because at that point in time, we had no idea if it was going to be another Vietnam or if this was going to be a short-lived excursion. Ultimately, it ended up being a relatively short deployment, and it didn’t escalate to the point a lot of people feared. But when you leave, you have no idea. It was a lot, psychologically, to think about and wrap your arms around. At age twenty, it’s a big deal.
S: And eventually, you got there. So what were your first impressions when you got there?
K: I actually think I remember getting there on October 31st, which of course, is Halloween. There was irony there. Not tricks or treats, but we actually ended up—there was just a whole lot of military deployments. I'm sure there were Army, Marines, Navy personnel, you name it, National Guard, et cetera, all basically coming in, probably to a few different places. I’m not sure if I remember the name of the port, but we landed essentially at a port in Saudi Arabia. For the first few days, we were in processing. So there was, again, a lot of paperwork, a lot of “hurry up and wait”. In the military, we talk about that a lot. You get there, you get all your stuff, you're ready to go, they say, “Okay. Stand down; we’ll let you know when we need you again.” So I remember us being in this huge—I don’t know if it was a warehouse or a hanger or what it was—but we were on cots, and we didn’t know if we were going to be there for a few hours or a few weeks. I think I remember us being there for perhaps three or four days at the beginning just sitting along the port. It was really quite beautiful to look out at the blue water there. Wish I could remember the name of the port. But it was very surreal at the time. Just hot weather right there on the port. I think there was a sea or a river there. This was a long time ago for me, but it was really just “hurry up and wait”. And once we did leave there, we went out in—of course to me, it was the middle of nowhere. But we were out in to a location out in the middle of the dessert essentially. And I was with a medical unit, so we were stationed with a few different medical units there. Then began the almost six-month deployment there. We were there most of the time. We did move once the Ground War began, moved into Iraq for a period of time. But for the most part, we were stationed in Saudi Arabia, awaiting further notice of when to go and where.
S: You talked about this a little bit, but maybe a little bit more once you were deployed—about your primary duties, the things you were tasked to do as a photojournalist within that unit.
K: Sure. What I envisioned happening was a little different from what actually did happen. I envisioned that I would be doing the work of a journalist most days, where I would be collecting news stories—trying to find human interest stories that we could then send back because part of what my responsibility was to help get information from the unit I was assigned to back to families and friends, people at Fort Hood, and they could communicate with families. That was an important task, and I did some of that, but quite honestly, when you're deployed for something like this, it’s kind of all hands on deck kind of operation. On a typical day, I really found myself doing more things like putting up tents, tearing down tents, moving equipment from this place to that place, making sand bags, doing just the everyday grunt work. I was a low ranking person at this time. I was an E4 specialist. I think I may have been the youngest person in my unit actually, if not, among the youngest. I spent a fair amount of time doing those kinds of mundane things from day to day. And then where there were opportunities, I would conduct interviews. There would be press pools that would come out to spend time with troops that were deployed. And so from time to time, there would be a pool of journalists that would come out to our unit. So a couple of the times there, I served as a liaison for members of the media. And so there were opportunities from time to time that I did go out and collect news stories and take some photographs, et cetera. But once the war actually began, there was one small window of time where I did almost all of my work as a journalist where I was taking lots of photographs. I felt like I almost couldn’t take enough photographs with how busy things were in like a three or four day period there. This is essentially when the Ground War was going on. That experience—then you really kind of got validated that, you know, I'm here for a good reason. This hasn’t been just six months lost. I really felt like I was contributing something meaningful and serve my country and things like that once the Ground War had started, and there was just a lot of activity going on, and I was there to help document that. It all of a sudden became very, very meaningful after a lot of time of sitting and waiting and wondering what’s going to happen and when. And would this be another Vietnam?
S: Could you tell me a little bit more about that period? You said it was kind of a short period but very intense.
K: Sure. I was with the first medical group, and under that, there are sort of like—you know, everyone’s familiar with the TV series MASH, which was mobile army surgical hospital. Well, we had a CASH: combat army surgical hospital. So there were a couple of CASHs that were part of the first medical group, so where I was physically, there were a couple of mobile hospitals there. Once the Ground War began, we actually moved from our location into Iraq. That was interesting. There was a lot going on at the time, but the news didn’t filter down to us very quickly at all. A lot of times, we were probably a couple of days behind the news, which is a bit ironic because I know people back in the states were seeing things almost in real time, if not in real time. And we were driving into Iraq, and this is kind of funny, but if you can imagine being in a vehicle driving into a warzone, I was in a yellow school bus. They had commandeered whatever they could to get people transferred from point A to point B. If there was a vehicle that worked, they needed it, and boy, you could fit a lot of people into a bus. There were probably twenty five or thirty of us, perhaps, on a yellow school bus driving into Iraq. I got a real kick out of that, but we didn’t know what was going on. We knew that the Ground War had actually. The war had actually started probably forty days or so before the Ground War began—I forget exactly the timing now. So we made our way into Iraq. We passed Iraqi soldiers who were surrendering, and I'm sure the civilians all saw this on the news, but they were happy. They were thrilled that they had been taken prisoner. They knew that they were probably going to be treated better by the Americans or the British or whomever. So that was just a really bizarre experience to see, again, driving into Iraq in my yellow school bus. And there were surrendering Iraqis who seemed like they were probably as happy as they could be. It took us a while for us to get updates on what was actually happening, but certainly we could tell that things were going in a positive direction and that this would be a short-lived thing. Once we did learn what was going on, we learned that it was a one hundred hour Ground War. It felt like when we got to where we were going, the Ground War was essentially over with. Now, coming right out of that, that’s about where we hit the real busy period — okay, the Ground War was over with, but there were casualties coming in. I have no idea how to quantify this; I don’t know how many casualties came in. A lot of them were actually Iraqi civilians who perhaps had set off a landmine—things of that nature. But I saw Iraqi children, civilians, and I actually have some other military personnel, both from Iraq and from other countries that came into the CASH hospitals. So it was hard to know exactly the context, and “how long would this go on; is this going to go on for a couple of days, a couple of weeks?” So anyways, it was really just a flurry of activity. I had my camera, of course had film in there, so that helped. I took a lot of color slide photography, took a lot of black and white photographs. At various points in time, I had the opportunity because I was there to document what was going on, what the unit was doing during Desert Storm, I went up in a helicopter a couple of times, and we flew over, and we could assess the whole situation a little bit better. I went out with the commanding officer. I remember at one point being very surprised: we went up in the helicopter, and we went for miles and miles and miles, and there was just nothing but sand, as far as the eye could see, which shouldn’t be surprising. But coming out of a war, I guess you’d expect to see a little more than that. But anyway, one place we did visit was what I think they called the Highway of Death. There was a highway somewhere in Iraq where the air campaign had left a lot of casualties along the side of the road, so you’d see burnt-out cars, and you could actually see the bodies still there. That was very memorable, to say the least, and I did take a few photographs of things along those lines. There were activities going on, so I did the best I could to take photographs; this is back where the unit was located in Iraq. The helicopters would come in periodically and just like out of a scene out of MASH, four of them would come out with a stretcher, take them back into the hospital, and I would get photographs of things like that. I didn’t go and take pictures of surgery being performed, anything along those lines. There was a lot going on—it was very different, interesting; a lot of it was very sad as well. There were families that had been displaced because of what was going on with the war. There were the military and probably other countries as well providing food relief, things like this. I remember being at a couple of stations where there were lines of Iraqi civilians getting food, water, things like that. So that was good to see some humanitarian efforts going on. I took some photographs of that. It felt like just a big blur there of three, four, five days—whatever it may have been where I saw a lot, and I just kept taking pictures, and there you have it.
S: This may be an unfair question, but are there particular photos, pictures that you're particularly proud of having?
K: Well, I think I did take some good photographs during that—especially those couple of days I referenced. I'm not sure if I feel that it’s my achievement as much as it is the achievement of those people that were in the photographs. The first medical group has all the images that I took, and it’s been twenty years now, but I'm hoping that they’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that and being proud of what they did when they deployed. It wasn’t a thing of personal pride as it was that I knew that when we got back, and they had several hundred photographs that I had taken, that I felt like I really contributed something long-term and that the unit could be very proud about what they had done in service to the country during Operation Desert Storm. Because, as I said, there was a lot of sitting around and waiting and wondering what’s going to happen next, but when duty called, there were a lot of people that contributed significantly and made an impact and affected the lives of people in the military, Iraqi civilians, and others. So that made the whole thing very meaningful for me, and I guess I'm proud of that and knowing that I've taken some good photographs. But there aren’t really particular photographs that I’d say stand out. It was just that the pictures I took really did document the story of the unit when they went to Desert Storm, so that was very meaningful to me.
S: Just more day-to-day things: how did you stay in touch with your family?
K: Yeah, this was before the era of cell phones and emails. Communication back to the United States was irregular. We would periodically have an opportunity when things weren’t busy to—a few a of us would get in a vehicle and drive a couple of hours to get to a city, and from there, there were arrangements made where we could make free long distance calls up to a certain amount of time. Boy, it’s been twenty years; I'm struggling to remember the specifics of that. We could certainly call collect, the military made it easy, if we had access to a phone, it was typically a pay phone. We would find—I think there were phone booths set up by the military. So I would say I communicated with my parents— I would say every three weeks or something like that. Now, when the Ground War began, it was a bit of a different story. I remember vividly how emotional my mother was when I called after the Ground War, because even though we knew the casualties were few, not having heard from me in a long time, she was quite excited to hear from me, so that was good. I was a single twenty year old; I think it was more important that people who had families communicate before I did. There were husbands calling their wives, wives calling their husbands, and kids and all of that. Anyway, communication was a bit irregular, but it felt like we communicated enough in a war zone that certainly we had better accommodations than I'm sure they had in Vietnam, World War II, et cetera. It was probably a much more modern war by all of those standards.
S: It occurs to me that part of your responsibilities was as kind of a communications link between where you were and the folks at Fort Hood.
K: Right, there were some communications mechanisms where other people in our unit were able to communicate more directly with the families and point people that were back at Fort Hood, Texas. So a lot of times what I did is, I went—if I was collecting like a human interest story or just gathering up some quotes from people, or if I were getting some black and white images developed—I would get that to the appropriate person, and they would make sure that that then got back to Fort Hood, Texas. Things like that. It wasn’t quite the, at least at our level, it wasn’t quite the instant communications that they probably have now. I think a precursor to the internet was just being developed at that point in time. It was not really ideal, but it was good enough that we were able to communicate with someone on a regular basis.
K: Just some lighter questions here. Everybody talks about military food. How was that for you?
S: Oh, the military food. Yeah. Well, I would say for the six months I was deployed, up until the Ground War began, it was a pretty routine situation for us where the unit next to us had a kitchen, and there were military cooks. So they would offer some things for breakfast, and either lunch or dinner would be a hot meal, and the other one—I think they alternated, if my memory serves me right. Lunch would be an MRE, and then dinner would be a hot meal. Or lunch would be a hot meal, and then for your dinner, you would have an MRE, which an MRE is meals ready to eat. In the military, we called them other things that we probably shouldn’t discuss, but they're not as bad as probably people make them out to be. You wouldn’t want to eat MREs for six months. So, just leave it at that.
K: Was it pretty much exclusively military, or did you get at all some of the local food?
S: You know, I would say it was pretty exclusive military food, probably ninety-eight percent of the experience. Now, when we began to deploy back to the United States leaving Saudi Arabia, this would have been probably for me in the April of 1991 time frame, where you could not imagine how excited you would be to see a McDonalds, an Arby’s. There was one day where we went to some location, and there was Arby’s and McDonald’s, and probably another option or two there. It was bizarre because I didn’t really consider myself a big fast food person, but after being away from it for four or five months at that point, I probably had to wipe the drool off of me, because it was like, “How much money do I have? I'm going to have that Big Mac!” Or whatever it was. That was terribly exciting for us because you don’t realize you miss something until it’s gone. And television was essentially the same way. So there was the rare occasion you’d have some access to American food, but I’d say if it was Saudi Arabia, there was—for whatever reason—there was a lot of access to pitas, pita bread, so we had all the pita bread we wanted. I'm not sure I understood at the time or even now, but apparently pita bread was—there was plenty there for the taking. And again, the time leading up to when we were leaving Saudi Arabia, they tried to give us a lot of opportunities for recreation because, basically, the war had gone better than expected, and they wanted to treat everyone well and get everyone back to the states happy and having had a good experience. They were providing access to swimming pools there the last couple of weeks. Swimming pools, and going to an urban center where there were shopping excursions, get a souvenir in Saudi Arabia, and things of that nature. So at that point in time, yeah, we had more access to some other foods and the cultural experience. Of course, when we would go there, I remember when we were shopping around. I’m trying to remember the name of the city we were at. It was probably Dhahran. I would walk into like a book store for example, and I remember at one point, there was two women there. Their veils were down, and as soon as they saw me, they went right back up. I was in my military uniform. It was just a different cultural experience, but you get exposed to things. It makes you take a step back and think about the context of the freedoms we have in the United States. If you went to the magazine rack in that same store, you’d see where somebody had taken a black marker and covered up pictures of Madonna or whomever. It was very interesting, and those are some of the things that kind of stick out in my mind.
S: Also, what kind of opportunities for entertainment—things you did in your free time or recreation?
K: I had a… of course, at that time, it wasn’t a CD player; it would have been a cassette player and head phones. Probably the biggest morale booster in the world for us was mail. That was the thing every day that you most looked forward to. I was lucky because my parents would send a lot of things in care packages, and friends would write and send pictures. That was beyond meaningful to us. It was our connection back home. There were some people that would write, who you might not have known, but it said, “Any soldier in Saudi Arabia.” Being from Ohio, I would look for someone from Ohio who had sent one of those, and I think other people were doing the same thing if they were from Oklahoma or Arkansas or wherever they might have been from. They would look for someone with a tie to that place. There were a few times where I started up a mail correspondence with someone who had written and just said, “Hey, we really support what you guys are doing. I would be really interested to hear back from you. Please write when you get a chance.” So there were some times when you’d correspond to those kinds of things. They were like school kids who would write and just really kind of made an impression on you because they were maybe in the fourth grade, and they would maybe write a short thing to you. They’d have a picture, Saddam Hussein with a slash through him. So you’d write them a letter back saying, “Thank you for taking the time to write. School’s important, and I hope you're doing well in your classes. Thanks for thinking of us.” Things like that. A lot of the times, we would do things like that. I wrote a lot of letters to keep busy. Otherwise, the recreational opportunities were pretty limited for the most part up until, as I said, before we left. I also really remember how the night sky—when we were out in the desert, there wasn’t very much light pollution. The sky was really amazing. The stars were very clear. So sometimes you would just go and walk around the perimeter of your unit and look up at the sky and kind of clear your head and think about, “I wonder what I'm going to do when I come back from Desert Storm.” You get a lot of time to think about life. What are you doing, when will you be back in the United States, and what’s the first thing you're going to do? Things like that. So I’d say that and listening to an awful lot of music with my headphones.
S: Are there any other events that struck you as unusual or unique or humorous, anything that you might recall?
K: Well, I kind of touched on a couple of them. I really think driving into combat in a yellow school bus really still makes me laugh to think about that. And again, when I came back, it was April of 1991. I was still about two months short of being twenty-one years old, so I was not old enough to drink an alcoholic beverage—not that I was coming back and that was priority one. Sometimes it’s put up as an academic argument: you’re old enough to do this, but you're not old enough to do that. I actually lived that, where I went off—not only was I in the military, but I went off to war, came back, was still not old enough to drink a beer, for example. So that sticks in my mind a bit. That was not a big deal in the big picture. It was just an interesting little scenario—an interesting commentary on some social policies, perhaps. I think when it all ended, and I came back to the United States, I thought through the six months I had been there and how I really, on a day-to-day basis, I really didn’t want to be there. I felt like I wish I could be back. Those things that you missed, like I mentioned about McDonalds. I missed watching sports; I missed watching television. Those kinds of everyday things that you take for granted. But when I reflect back on it, even though on a day-to-day basis, I probably would have preferred to be back in the United States, I felt really good about having gone when I did get back. We had a big celebration when our unit returned back to Fort Hood, and of course, they treated us like royalty. A lot of peoples’ families and friends came and greeted them, and the people that I worked with typically at Fort Hood who stayed back, they were there. It was a very feel good time when we returned, and I thought, “Boy, I’m just going to watch baseball the next month. I don’t want anybody to bother me. I just want to do my own thing.” Then you do think, “Well, I’m glad I was part of this.” You think about a historical legacy. “Well, if my life ends tomorrow, I’ll have done the right thing—served my country. I think ultimately what I did was important.” Even though I sometimes wasn’t thrilled about being over there, at the end, I was very glad I had done it. And twenty years later, I can think back and talk to you about that experience, and say, “You know, I'm glad I did that.”
S: One thing I was curious about —in a couple of ways—the kind of relations you had with people in your unit, especially given the work you were doing, being a little bit different. Were you looked upon differently?
K: I was a little bit. I was basically the youngest guy in the unit. The people that were—I think at the time, there were eight or ten of us in one tent. That was our sleeping space. The guys in my unit, they were mechanics, or an administrative clerk, a cook. Here I was—this highfalutin’ photojournalist. This twenty year old kid. I think it wasn’t any big deal, but yeah, I think they thought I had it pretty good, all things considered. In fact, the mechanic in our unit was probably the most valuable person in our unit because a lot of things seemed to break down. Sand would get into everything there. It seemed like there were always trucks or generators or other things that needed fixed, and it seemed like this one guy in particular was the go-to. He could fix anything, and he probably worked eighteen hours a day. Those were some of the people I worked with, or I interacted with, on a pretty regular basis. But our unit was a medical unit, so most of their professions related some way to medical work, nursing, and so forth. So I was a bit of an odd man out in some respects there. I certainly did as many sandbags as the next guy. In the end, those are the kinds of things that have to be done. I’d say I got along well enough with the people in my unit. They were probably a lot different than me. I don’t remember anyone else from Ohio being in the unit I was in. In a situation like that, everyone comes together, and you don’t really focus on the differences so much as you do on we’re all in this together, and we need to get the mission done.
S: Afterwards then, did you use the GI Bill to get—?
K: I did. I got out of the military in June of 1992 and then started college at Bowling Green State University that fall. I had invested in the GI Bill at that time. It did not pay the college bills, but it certainly helped substantially with it. So I did take advantage of that, while I was at Bowling Green.
S: What was your area of concentration or major?
K: I had a double major at Bowling Green in public relations and political science. So journalism with a specialization in public relations, and political science.
S: Did you get this job right after?
K: No, I graduated in 1996, and then I moved to Columbus afterward. I actually worked in several different positions doing things in the government relations area. I worked for a member of congress for a couple of years here in Columbus. A couple of other non-profit organizations. I began working here in the Ohio Historical Society in December of 2004, so I've been here more than five years.
S: So just reflecting back, how would you say that your service from ’88-’92 and experiences affected your life to this point?
K: Oh boy, it affected my life profoundly. It’s interesting to think of what path I may have taken if I decided not to humor the recruiter in 1988 and if I just said, “I’m not interested. Good bye.” At that point, I really hadn’t done a very good job of preparing myself for what to do after high school. I was having fun, but you know, I had pretty good grades, but I thought I was interested in Bowling Green. Yet I wasn’t sure if I could accomplish that financially. So I was just at a place where I wasn’t sure. It’s just interesting to wonder what different path I might have taken. As I look back, I think, “Boy, it affected me profoundly.” A lot of lessons learned; I think I referenced earlier where I saw some examples of how to do something the right way and how to not go about doing something. The military may be somewhat different now than it was twenty years ago, but I remember specifically not being enamored with the thought that you are really saluting a uniform. There were a lot of things in the military where they depersonalize the people. It’s “We need a body.” It’s “We need somebody at this rank who has the qualifications.” There were a lot of things that run counter to my own personal perspective, where I think the individual is much more important. That just made a big impression on me, so when I got out of the military, I had a good experience overall, but as I look back on it, I think it really taught me to really emphasize the personalization. I didn’t really agree with depersonalizing. That’s one thing that sticks out in my mind—that I was determined to not think of things in a depersonalized approach. But as I said, I had a good experience overall. I'm glad I did what I did because I think it really shaped me after that, even to the minor things of it really made me a morning person, for example. I had to wake up early most days, and to this day, I'm very much a morning person. Paying attention to details is something I very much learned in the military. I like to think I pay pretty good attention to detail these days. Some people would debate that. Overall, a good experience. I'm glad I did learn those skills: the journalism, photography, attention to detail. And it was such a radical change from what I was doing when I was eighteen years old. It really positioned me for success later. Another good example I didn’t mention was while I was at Bowling Green, I was a little bit older than the normal college student—I mean, just by a couple of years—but I was very interested in politics, and at that time, there was a student on the Bowling Green City Council. There was a ward that was mostly BGSU students, and he said, “You know, I'm not running for reelection next year. With your military service and background and your interest in politics, you really ought to think about that.” And I did. I had the political bug for sure. So in 1993, I ran for and was elected to a term on the Bowling Green City Council, which was a huge educational experience in it of itself. That was a close three-way race for that seat. I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t have the military experience, and kind of had some life lessons at that point in time. I was twenty-three at that point. So that really positioned me to have accomplished a couple of important things by my early twenties that I would not have done had I not joined the military. As I said, public service is very important to me, so having served in the military, having deployed to Desert Storm, having served a term as an elected official—those are things I can look back now, even though those were quite a few years ago, very proud of that. I think it really did cement for me the importance of public service, being involved in the community, civic engagement. All those things are very important to me today, and I think it’s because of those experiences early on.
S: Is there any one story that you think you might plan on sharing with your children or grandchildren or nieces or nephews in the future, or now?
K: About the military experience?
S: Yeah.
K: Certainly there are a few things that stand out. I don’t know if they would make for very entertaining stories or not. I keep referencing the driving into combat in the yellow school bus; that’s one that kind of stands out to me. Boy, I don’t know. I really do think that sometimes, like I mentioned, when I first went to basic training, I thought I made a huge mistake. Oh, especially those first few days. I’ll admit; I cried the first couple of days. I thought I made the biggest mistake of my life. Of course, I was eighteen at the time. I thought, “What have I gotten myself into? I am not going to get through this. Boy, what have I done?” I think sometimes you just have to do a radical change. For me, I think where I was at that point in time told me I need to do something totally different. And having endured and gone through what I thought was a terrible mistake, it wasn’t terribly long before I realized, I think I did the right thing here. They're life lessons. I don’t know if a particular humor story sticks out, but I think just what life deals you and the cards you're dealt and taking advantage of it. I could have continued to think of myself as a victim in basic training, and “Woe is me”, and “Boy, didn’t I screw this up?” And I'm glad. I probably wouldn’t choose to go through basic training again, but I think despite what I thought at the time, I am able to look back now and say it was the right thing to do. I do have a daughter; right now, she’s only seventeen months old, but in the future, I think I can talk about some of these experiences and say, “Sometimes you think you’re on the short end of the stick on something, but hang in there. I think you’ll find that there are more opportunities out there than probably you realize right now.”
S: Is there anything else that you can think of that I haven’t covered that you might want to say or add?
K: I don’t think so other than, one thing I didn’t really talk much about. When I got back from Desert Storm, I came back to Fort Hood, Texas. I wanted to continue to get more out of my military experience. I was supposed to be in the army for a five year enlistment. When I got back from Desert Storm, I had probably been in about two and half years—so roughly halfway through my enlistment. Well, I did a stateside swap with someone. There was someone who was at Fort Lewis, Washington who wanted to be in Texas because he was from Texas. I thought, “You know, yeah. Let’s do something different.” We both got approval through our units to switch. They call it a stateside swap. So I went to Fort Lewis, Washington. He took my place at Fort Hood, Texas. I finished my time in the military at Fort Lewis, Washington, which was totally different. Vast different part of the country—the northwest corner of the country, and I really enjoyed being there. As it turned out, because of the end of the Cold War, Desert Storm having ended successfully, the military was making big cutbacks at that time, so they said, “If you’ve been in for at least three years, you can essentially pick a date, and if your unit approves, you can get out of the military early,” so I decided I wanted to do that because I’d been in, at that time, more than three years, I’d been to war, I was now stationed at my second military installation. I thought, “You know, I don’t think I'm going to get a whole lot more out of these next two years.” It ended up being an ideal situation for me. I got out very close to my twenty-second birthday, and I could start college that fall. My military service ended up very much on a high note where I was able to dictate the circumstances with how I ended my service. So that was a real positive thing, and I could start college having had a couple of years’ experience working as a journalist. I think that really positioned me for success in the future. I'm pretty pleased with how that all worked out. It was good.
S: Is there anything else you want to add about yourself, about your experiences?
K: I don’t think so.
S: I guess we’re finished. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
K: Sure, sure.

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S: Today is July 29, 2010. My name is Phil Sager, and I will be giving an interview with Todd Kleismit, at the Ohio Historical Society, formerly an Army photojournalist during the Gulf War. This interview is being conducted here at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, Ohio as part of an oral history project by the Society to preserve the stories and experiences of service members and their family members for future generations. The recordings will be used for scholarly and educational purposes, as well as published on the Ohio Memory website. Thanks, Todd. I just want to start with some personal background, and could you tell me a little about you background? You know? Things about where you were born, and when and where you grew up, family, and so on.
K: Sure. I’m originally from Dayton, Ohio. I grew up in Dayton and graduated from Trotwood-Madison High School in 1988, and actually the day… the day that I graduated, joining the military was one of the furthest things from my mind, and just quickly, I decided it was very fortuitous that an Army recruiter called me just at the right time –from his perspective, I think – where I wasn’t so sure where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do, so I thought I would go in and humor the recruiter by going in and having a conversation with them. I went in and talked to him in the summer of ‘88, and said, “Well, you know, the military sounds interesting, but I’m really more interested in going to school and becoming a journalist.” And he said, “Did you know we had journalists in the Army?” And right there I said, “No, say more.” And then he did, and one conversation led to another, and before I knew it, I had more or less convinced myself that it was probably a good option for me at that time and that particular context. My parents were stunned. They had no idea, and my father is a former Marine, who after I told him the news that I was thinking about joining the Army – at that point I was pretty sure I was going to – and he said, “Well heck! The Navy called last week, and I said ‘He’s not interested in that.’” So it all happened rather quickly. So, I ended up joining the Army later that year in ‘88 when I was eighteen years old.
S: Wow. So, your family, were they pretty… I mean after they got over the shock and stun, were they pretty accepting of your decision?
K: Yeah. They were very supportive, and… as I said, at that particular point in time, I was contemplating which college to go to, and is that really my first choice, and is that really the right thing to do? Maybe I should have, you know, given this a lot more thought, maybe a year or two before this point in time. So, as I said, the recruiter called me at just that right time when I wasn’t quite sure which direction to go, and I thought I could spend a few years in the Military and help figure out what career path I ultimately want to take. So, that’s what I did. I looked at it as a vast change in my normal, everyday routine, and this would really set me on a different course, and give me time to figure out which profession and career that I ultimately wanted to pursue.
S: So you were saying before that you really hadn’t thought about the military prior to your contact with the recruiter. What were your impressions of the military before you started talking to him?
K: Well, I think I had a relatively positive impression of the armed services. It just wasn’t anything I had seriously considered, and so it was very much a learning experience when I talked to the recruiter at that time. The more I learned, the more I started to envision myself doing that, at least for a few years. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to make a full career out of it, but having the opportunity to do something totally different to earn some college money. I do very much value public service, and so those were all very attractive things to me. When I thought about it, I thought I could do this for a few years, still be in my early twenties and go to college with some experience under my belt, and that’s probably a pretty good option for me.
S: So after you talked with the recruiter, and he mentioned there was this program for journalism, how’d things go from there?
K: Well, apparently, and of course I was only eighteen at the time…I didn’t know…I think there was some skepticism about, “Oh, here comes another eighteen year old who wants to go and be a photo journalist in the Army.” Well boy, you know, that job is hard to come by. You’ll be lucky. You have to score at a certain level, and even if you do that, those jobs are pretty rare. I learned all this after I fell in love with the idea. So, it ended up working out in my favor where as we started to move down this path, I remember one of the Army sergeants at the time typing something into the computer, basically trying to tell me basically, “What would be your second choice if you weren’t a journalist?” Kind of preparing me if the job wasn’t available. I remember him typing something in and saying, “Wow. This is rare. This job is actually available. Im going to go ahead and secure this for you.” Typed it in and locked it in. And so, that, in my mind, was kind of set in concrete. Up to that point, I’m not sure if they could have convinced me to go in to be some other profession. So once that was done, to me that kind of locked it in, and then we ended up… I left for basic training then in November of ‘88. The way it works out is you go through basic training, and then following that, you then go to your school to learn the profession you are going into. I liked writing, but I didn’t really come in with a journalism background from high school or anything along those lines. So it really was a kind of learning from scratch once I finished basic training to go to the Defense Information School, where I learned the basics of journalism, and I really enjoyed it. It was challenging for me. I was eighteen. I was one of the younger people in my cohort. I had an excellent teacher and learned it…I think once I learned to write and how to take good photographs, it really stuck with me. There was a strong learning curve for me, but it all worked out for me in the end.
S: So you were in that program for how long?
K: Let’s see. I think I was at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. I'm not sure if that military installation is still open or not. This would have been spring of 1989. I believe the course—I don’t remember specifically—I’ll say it was something like twelve weeks, give or take.
S: And you had indicated this was after your basic training?
K: It was.
S: What was that experience like?
K: Basic training? I wouldn’t want to do it again; let’s put it that way. For an eighteen year old growing up in Dayton, Ohio, it was a complete culture change and definitely throws you for a loop. I was your typical eighteen year old where I had a girlfriend at the time, and I was used to hanging out and having fun at King’s Island and things of this nature—and probably sleeping in more than most people perhaps. Basic training is a little different than that. I will never forget them clanging the trash cans every morning for your first week at probably something like five A.M. or 0500, and as the old army commercial used to say, we do more by eight A.M. than most people do all day. Seemed pretty accurate to me at the time. Basic training was a big challenge for me. It’s one of those things where you certainly wouldn’t want to do it again, but I was glad and I guess somewhat proud that I had gotten through it. It was physically challenging, certainly was emotionally challenging. It certainly pushed me, and it was just a complete change from what I was accustomed to. I felt pretty good at the end of it, and I was hoping that the rest of my experience in the military would not be as challenging in any way. It was just a huge difference in what I was accustomed to.
S: How about influences or mentors – people that may have helped you during the course of your enlistment, either in terms of training, or journalism or photojournalism?
K: Looking back at my military experience, I think there was a mix of good examples and what to follow and looking up to some people who were supervisors or in my chain of command in some respects, and then there were a number of—I guess I’d say poor examples. I knew I didn’t want to do things the way this or that person did it, or things of that nature. But I’d say generally I'm more of a self-counseled person; there probably isn’t a big example of someone who mentored me or things along those lines. And I think that probably served me well to hit some of the bumps in the road and learn from experience. In fact, I remember one of my first assignments. I finished the basic journalism course. I was sent to Fort Hood, Texas, and it was a public affairs office. I was probably still eighteen at the time. And there was a military officer that needed someone to take photographs to help document something. This may have even been my first assignment, and I was eighteen. I forgot to load the camera, and I went around and took probably the equivalent of a roll of film. How mortified I was when I finished the assignment and opened up the camera and realized I hadn’t put film in there. So there were a lot of examples, where, that taught me a huge lesson. Certainly didn’t want to repeat things like that, so I learned very quickly to pay very close attention to detail and learn from those experiences, not repeat them. People that worked with me in the military would probably say that I was very good at what I did, but there were some bumps along the road for sure. I had a pretty good experience overall, and I probably wouldn’t have changed too many things—even that experience when I didn’t load up the camera. Of course, these days, it would be digital, so it wouldn’t have that problem.
K: Let’s move on to your periods of mobilization. What unit of the army were you a member of?
S: This was 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. At the time, I was in the public affairs office at the 13th Core Support Command. The acronym for that is COSCOM: 13th COSCOM. The public affairs unit—it’s a medium sized military unit. There were probably a dozen battalions as part of that unit. Basically when you’re stationed there, you are the newspaper journalist for that unit, so my usual routine at that point in time was to cover the activities going on in the 13th COSCOM at Fort Hood on a day to day basis. There were training exercises going on, or maybe there was some news activity. Certainly when Fort Hood began to mobilize for Desert Storm—at that point, it was Operation Desert Shield—there were some units that were called up, and that became a news activity for me. I went to take photographs, and I did news stories for the Fort Hood Sentinel Newspaper, which was a weekly newspaper. So that was my normal routine. At about the time when I learned that the first medical group—which was part of the 13th COSCOM—they were called up to deploy to Desert Shield at that time. I was attached the unit at that time, and they said, “Well, we need a photojournalist, and so you’re going over with us.” And at that point in time, I could see the pros and the cons, but you don’t really have much of a choice. So, you're called up, and you just salute and say, “Okay, when do I report?” I was twenty years old at that time. I think it was probably about two months from the time I was notified and the time that we ended up deploying, which was late October of 1990, so that was kind of the context in which that all happened very quickly. Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, the public discussion—if there was one—was the end of the Cold War. Are we going to have a war any time in the near future? Didn’t look likely at all. It seemed like one of the most unlikeliest things possible with the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism collapsing. At that time, to think about being deployed to war was—even though I was in the army obviously—seemed very remote. So this all happened quickly from August 2nd of 1990 when Iraq invaded to my deployment at the end of October, and I ended up in Saudi Arabia and Iraq just shy of six months.
S: So were there a lot of preparations involved in getting mobilized and up to speed, and across the ocean?
K: There were. There were a lot of preparations, and a lot of it was paperwork, vaccinations, meetings to get prepared: here’s what you need to take; here’s what you shouldn’t take with you, and preparing for being deployed into a different culture. So there was some time spent discussing the culture of the Middle East and what is acceptable, what is not. And in the context of being in the military, being deployed over there, the cultural changes. And as I mentioned, I remember going through a lot of vaccinations and filling out a lot of paperwork and just mentally preparing yourself, because at that point in time, we had no idea if it was going to be another Vietnam or if this was going to be a short-lived excursion. Ultimately, it ended up being a relatively short deployment, and it didn’t escalate to the point a lot of people feared. But when you leave, you have no idea. It was a lot, psychologically, to think about and wrap your arms around. At age twenty, it’s a big deal.
S: And eventually, you got there. So what were your first impressions when you got there?
K: I actually think I remember getting there on October 31st, which of course, is Halloween. There was irony there. Not tricks or treats, but we actually ended up—there was just a whole lot of military deployments. I'm sure there were Army, Marines, Navy personnel, you name it, National Guard, et cetera, all basically coming in, probably to a few different places. I’m not sure if I remember the name of the port, but we landed essentially at a port in Saudi Arabia. For the first few days, we were in processing. So there was, again, a lot of paperwork, a lot of “hurry up and wait”. In the military, we talk about that a lot. You get there, you get all your stuff, you're ready to go, they say, “Okay. Stand down; we’ll let you know when we need you again.” So I remember us being in this huge—I don’t know if it was a warehouse or a hanger or what it was—but we were on cots, and we didn’t know if we were going to be there for a few hours or a few weeks. I think I remember us being there for perhaps three or four days at the beginning just sitting along the port. It was really quite beautiful to look out at the blue water there. Wish I could remember the name of the port. But it was very surreal at the time. Just hot weather right there on the port. I think there was a sea or a river there. This was a long time ago for me, but it was really just “hurry up and wait”. And once we did leave there, we went out in—of course to me, it was the middle of nowhere. But we were out in to a location out in the middle of the dessert essentially. And I was with a medical unit, so we were stationed with a few different medical units there. Then began the almost six-month deployment there. We were there most of the time. We did move once the Ground War began, moved into Iraq for a period of time. But for the most part, we were stationed in Saudi Arabia, awaiting further notice of when to go and where.
S: You talked about this a little bit, but maybe a little bit more once you were deployed—about your primary duties, the things you were tasked to do as a photojournalist within that unit.
K: Sure. What I envisioned happening was a little different from what actually did happen. I envisioned that I would be doing the work of a journalist most days, where I would be collecting news stories—trying to find human interest stories that we could then send back because part of what my responsibility was to help get information from the unit I was assigned to back to families and friends, people at Fort Hood, and they could communicate with families. That was an important task, and I did some of that, but quite honestly, when you're deployed for something like this, it’s kind of all hands on deck kind of operation. On a typical day, I really found myself doing more things like putting up tents, tearing down tents, moving equipment from this place to that place, making sand bags, doing just the everyday grunt work. I was a low ranking person at this time. I was an E4 specialist. I think I may have been the youngest person in my unit actually, if not, among the youngest. I spent a fair amount of time doing those kinds of mundane things from day to day. And then where there were opportunities, I would conduct interviews. There would be press pools that would come out to spend time with troops that were deployed. And so from time to time, there would be a pool of journalists that would come out to our unit. So a couple of the times there, I served as a liaison for members of the media. And so there were opportunities from time to time that I did go out and collect news stories and take some photographs, et cetera. But once the war actually began, there was one small window of time where I did almost all of my work as a journalist where I was taking lots of photographs. I felt like I almost couldn’t take enough photographs with how busy things were in like a three or four day period there. This is essentially when the Ground War was going on. That experience—then you really kind of got validated that, you know, I'm here for a good reason. This hasn’t been just six months lost. I really felt like I was contributing something meaningful and serve my country and things like that once the Ground War had started, and there was just a lot of activity going on, and I was there to help document that. It all of a sudden became very, very meaningful after a lot of time of sitting and waiting and wondering what’s going to happen and when. And would this be another Vietnam?
S: Could you tell me a little bit more about that period? You said it was kind of a short period but very intense.
K: Sure. I was with the first medical group, and under that, there are sort of like—you know, everyone’s familiar with the TV series MASH, which was mobile army surgical hospital. Well, we had a CASH: combat army surgical hospital. So there were a couple of CASHs that were part of the first medical group, so where I was physically, there were a couple of mobile hospitals there. Once the Ground War began, we actually moved from our location into Iraq. That was interesting. There was a lot going on at the time, but the news didn’t filter down to us very quickly at all. A lot of times, we were probably a couple of days behind the news, which is a bit ironic because I know people back in the states were seeing things almost in real time, if not in real time. And we were driving into Iraq, and this is kind of funny, but if you can imagine being in a vehicle driving into a warzone, I was in a yellow school bus. They had commandeered whatever they could to get people transferred from point A to point B. If there was a vehicle that worked, they needed it, and boy, you could fit a lot of people into a bus. There were probably twenty five or thirty of us, perhaps, on a yellow school bus driving into Iraq. I got a real kick out of that, but we didn’t know what was going on. We knew that the Ground War had actually. The war had actually started probably forty days or so before the Ground War began—I forget exactly the timing now. So we made our way into Iraq. We passed Iraqi soldiers who were surrendering, and I'm sure the civilians all saw this on the news, but they were happy. They were thrilled that they had been taken prisoner. They knew that they were probably going to be treated better by the Americans or the British or whomever. So that was just a really bizarre experience to see, again, driving into Iraq in my yellow school bus. And there were surrendering Iraqis who seemed like they were probably as happy as they could be. It took us a while for us to get updates on what was actually happening, but certainly we could tell that things were going in a positive direction and that this would be a short-lived thing. Once we did learn what was going on, we learned that it was a one hundred hour Ground War. It felt like when we got to where we were going, the Ground War was essentially over with. Now, coming right out of that, that’s about where we hit the real busy period — okay, the Ground War was over with, but there were casualties coming in. I have no idea how to quantify this; I don’t know how many casualties came in. A lot of them were actually Iraqi civilians who perhaps had set off a landmine—things of that nature. But I saw Iraqi children, civilians, and I actually have some other military personnel, both from Iraq and from other countries that came into the CASH hospitals. So it was hard to know exactly the context, and “how long would this go on; is this going to go on for a couple of days, a couple of weeks?” So anyways, it was really just a flurry of activity. I had my camera, of course had film in there, so that helped. I took a lot of color slide photography, took a lot of black and white photographs. At various points in time, I had the opportunity because I was there to document what was going on, what the unit was doing during Desert Storm, I went up in a helicopter a couple of times, and we flew over, and we could assess the whole situation a little bit better. I went out with the commanding officer. I remember at one point being very surprised: we went up in the helicopter, and we went for miles and miles and miles, and there was just nothing but sand, as far as the eye could see, which shouldn’t be surprising. But coming out of a war, I guess you’d expect to see a little more than that. But anyway, one place we did visit was what I think they called the Highway of Death. There was a highway somewhere in Iraq where the air campaign had left a lot of casualties along the side of the road, so you’d see burnt-out cars, and you could actually see the bodies still there. That was very memorable, to say the least, and I did take a few photographs of things along those lines. There were activities going on, so I did the best I could to take photographs; this is back where the unit was located in Iraq. The helicopters would come in periodically and just like out of a scene out of MASH, four of them would come out with a stretcher, take them back into the hospital, and I would get photographs of things like that. I didn’t go and take pictures of surgery being performed, anything along those lines. There was a lot going on—it was very different, interesting; a lot of it was very sad as well. There were families that had been displaced because of what was going on with the war. There were the military and probably other countries as well providing food relief, things like this. I remember being at a couple of stations where there were lines of Iraqi civilians getting food, water, things like that. So that was good to see some humanitarian efforts going on. I took some photographs of that. It felt like just a big blur there of three, four, five days—whatever it may have been where I saw a lot, and I just kept taking pictures, and there you have it.
S: This may be an unfair question, but are there particular photos, pictures that you're particularly proud of having?
K: Well, I think I did take some good photographs during that—especially those couple of days I referenced. I'm not sure if I feel that it’s my achievement as much as it is the achievement of those people that were in the photographs. The first medical group has all the images that I took, and it’s been twenty years now, but I'm hoping that they’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that and being proud of what they did when they deployed. It wasn’t a thing of personal pride as it was that I knew that when we got back, and they had several hundred photographs that I had taken, that I felt like I really contributed something long-term and that the unit could be very proud about what they had done in service to the country during Operation Desert Storm. Because, as I said, there was a lot of sitting around and waiting and wondering what’s going to happen next, but when duty called, there were a lot of people that contributed significantly and made an impact and affected the lives of people in the military, Iraqi civilians, and others. So that made the whole thing very meaningful for me, and I guess I'm proud of that and knowing that I've taken some good photographs. But there aren’t really particular photographs that I’d say stand out. It was just that the pictures I took really did document the story of the unit when they went to Desert Storm, so that was very meaningful to me.
S: Just more day-to-day things: how did you stay in touch with your family?
K: Yeah, this was before the era of cell phones and emails. Communication back to the United States was irregular. We would periodically have an opportunity when things weren’t busy to—a few a of us would get in a vehicle and drive a couple of hours to get to a city, and from there, there were arrangements made where we could make free long distance calls up to a certain amount of time. Boy, it’s been twenty years; I'm struggling to remember the specifics of that. We could certainly call collect, the military made it easy, if we had access to a phone, it was typically a pay phone. We would find—I think there were phone booths set up by the military. So I would say I communicated with my parents— I would say every three weeks or something like that. Now, when the Ground War began, it was a bit of a different story. I remember vividly how emotional my mother was when I called after the Ground War, because even though we knew the casualties were few, not having heard from me in a long time, she was quite excited to hear from me, so that was good. I was a single twenty year old; I think it was more important that people who had families communicate before I did. There were husbands calling their wives, wives calling their husbands, and kids and all of that. Anyway, communication was a bit irregular, but it felt like we communicated enough in a war zone that certainly we had better accommodations than I'm sure they had in Vietnam, World War II, et cetera. It was probably a much more modern war by all of those standards.
S: It occurs to me that part of your responsibilities was as kind of a communications link between where you were and the folks at Fort Hood.
K: Right, there were some communications mechanisms where other people in our unit were able to communicate more directly with the families and point people that were back at Fort Hood, Texas. So a lot of times what I did is, I went—if I was collecting like a human interest story or just gathering up some quotes from people, or if I were getting some black and white images developed—I would get that to the appropriate person, and they would make sure that that then got back to Fort Hood, Texas. Things like that. It wasn’t quite the, at least at our level, it wasn’t quite the instant communications that they probably have now. I think a precursor to the internet was just being developed at that point in time. It was not really ideal, but it was good enough that we were able to communicate with someone on a regular basis.
K: Just some lighter questions here. Everybody talks about military food. How was that for you?
S: Oh, the military food. Yeah. Well, I would say for the six months I was deployed, up until the Ground War began, it was a pretty routine situation for us where the unit next to us had a kitchen, and there were military cooks. So they would offer some things for breakfast, and either lunch or dinner would be a hot meal, and the other one—I think they alternated, if my memory serves me right. Lunch would be an MRE, and then dinner would be a hot meal. Or lunch would be a hot meal, and then for your dinner, you would have an MRE, which an MRE is meals ready to eat. In the military, we called them other things that we probably shouldn’t discuss, but they're not as bad as probably people make them out to be. You wouldn’t want to eat MREs for six months. So, just leave it at that.
K: Was it pretty much exclusively military, or did you get at all some of the local food?
S: You know, I would say it was pretty exclusive military food, probably ninety-eight percent of the experience. Now, when we began to deploy back to the United States leaving Saudi Arabia, this would have been probably for me in the April of 1991 time frame, where you could not imagine how excited you would be to see a McDonalds, an Arby’s. There was one day where we went to some location, and there was Arby’s and McDonald’s, and probably another option or two there. It was bizarre because I didn’t really consider myself a big fast food person, but after being away from it for four or five months at that point, I probably had to wipe the drool off of me, because it was like, “How much money do I have? I'm going to have that Big Mac!” Or whatever it was. That was terribly exciting for us because you don’t realize you miss something until it’s gone. And television was essentially the same way. So there was the rare occasion you’d have some access to American food, but I’d say if it was Saudi Arabia, there was—for whatever reason—there was a lot of access to pitas, pita bread, so we had all the pita bread we wanted. I'm not sure I understood at the time or even now, but apparently pita bread was—there was plenty there for the taking. And again, the time leading up to when we were leaving Saudi Arabia, they tried to give us a lot of opportunities for recreation because, basically, the war had gone better than expected, and they wanted to treat everyone well and get everyone back to the states happy and having had a good experience. They were providing access to swimming pools there the last couple of weeks. Swimming pools, and going to an urban center where there were shopping excursions, get a souvenir in Saudi Arabia, and things of that nature. So at that point in time, yeah, we had more access to some other foods and the cultural experience. Of course, when we would go there, I remember when we were shopping around. I’m trying to remember the name of the city we were at. It was probably Dhahran. I would walk into like a book store for example, and I remember at one point, there was two women there. Their veils were down, and as soon as they saw me, they went right back up. I was in my military uniform. It was just a different cultural experience, but you get exposed to things. It makes you take a step back and think about the context of the freedoms we have in the United States. If you went to the magazine rack in that same store, you’d see where somebody had taken a black marker and covered up pictures of Madonna or whomever. It was very interesting, and those are some of the things that kind of stick out in my mind.
S: Also, what kind of opportunities for entertainment—things you did in your free time or recreation?
K: I had a… of course, at that time, it wasn’t a CD player; it would have been a cassette player and head phones. Probably the biggest morale booster in the world for us was mail. That was the thing every day that you most looked forward to. I was lucky because my parents would send a lot of things in care packages, and friends would write and send pictures. That was beyond meaningful to us. It was our connection back home. There were some people that would write, who you might not have known, but it said, “Any soldier in Saudi Arabia.” Being from Ohio, I would look for someone from Ohio who had sent one of those, and I think other people were doing the same thing if they were from Oklahoma or Arkansas or wherever they might have been from. They would look for someone with a tie to that place. There were a few times where I started up a mail correspondence with someone who had written and just said, “Hey, we really support what you guys are doing. I would be really interested to hear back from you. Please write when you get a chance.” So there were some times when you’d correspond to those kinds of things. They were like school kids who would write and just really kind of made an impression on you because they were maybe in the fourth grade, and they would maybe write a short thing to you. They’d have a picture, Saddam Hussein with a slash through him. So you’d write them a letter back saying, “Thank you for taking the time to write. School’s important, and I hope you're doing well in your classes. Thanks for thinking of us.” Things like that. A lot of the times, we would do things like that. I wrote a lot of letters to keep busy. Otherwise, the recreational opportunities were pretty limited for the most part up until, as I said, before we left. I also really remember how the night sky—when we were out in the desert, there wasn’t very much light pollution. The sky was really amazing. The stars were very clear. So sometimes you would just go and walk around the perimeter of your unit and look up at the sky and kind of clear your head and think about, “I wonder what I'm going to do when I come back from Desert Storm.” You get a lot of time to think about life. What are you doing, when will you be back in the United States, and what’s the first thing you're going to do? Things like that. So I’d say that and listening to an awful lot of music with my headphones.
S: Are there any other events that struck you as unusual or unique or humorous, anything that you might recall?
K: Well, I kind of touched on a couple of them. I really think driving into combat in a yellow school bus really still makes me laugh to think about that. And again, when I came back, it was April of 1991. I was still about two months short of being twenty-one years old, so I was not old enough to drink an alcoholic beverage—not that I was coming back and that was priority one. Sometimes it’s put up as an academic argument: you’re old enough to do this, but you're not old enough to do that. I actually lived that, where I went off—not only was I in the military, but I went off to war, came back, was still not old enough to drink a beer, for example. So that sticks in my mind a bit. That was not a big deal in the big picture. It was just an interesting little scenario—an interesting commentary on some social policies, perhaps. I think when it all ended, and I came back to the United States, I thought through the six months I had been there and how I really, on a day-to-day basis, I really didn’t want to be there. I felt like I wish I could be back. Those things that you missed, like I mentioned about McDonalds. I missed watching sports; I missed watching television. Those kinds of everyday things that you take for granted. But when I reflect back on it, even though on a day-to-day basis, I probably would have preferred to be back in the United States, I felt really good about having gone when I did get back. We had a big celebration when our unit returned back to Fort Hood, and of course, they treated us like royalty. A lot of peoples’ families and friends came and greeted them, and the people that I worked with typically at Fort Hood who stayed back, they were there. It was a very feel good time when we returned, and I thought, “Boy, I’m just going to watch baseball the next month. I don’t want anybody to bother me. I just want to do my own thing.” Then you do think, “Well, I’m glad I was part of this.” You think about a historical legacy. “Well, if my life ends tomorrow, I’ll have done the right thing—served my country. I think ultimately what I did was important.” Even though I sometimes wasn’t thrilled about being over there, at the end, I was very glad I had done it. And twenty years later, I can think back and talk to you about that experience, and say, “You know, I'm glad I did that.”
S: One thing I was curious about —in a couple of ways—the kind of relations you had with people in your unit, especially given the work you were doing, being a little bit different. Were you looked upon differently?
K: I was a little bit. I was basically the youngest guy in the unit. The people that were—I think at the time, there were eight or ten of us in one tent. That was our sleeping space. The guys in my unit, they were mechanics, or an administrative clerk, a cook. Here I was—this highfalutin’ photojournalist. This twenty year old kid. I think it wasn’t any big deal, but yeah, I think they thought I had it pretty good, all things considered. In fact, the mechanic in our unit was probably the most valuable person in our unit because a lot of things seemed to break down. Sand would get into everything there. It seemed like there were always trucks or generators or other things that needed fixed, and it seemed like this one guy in particular was the go-to. He could fix anything, and he probably worked eighteen hours a day. Those were some of the people I worked with, or I interacted with, on a pretty regular basis. But our unit was a medical unit, so most of their professions related some way to medical work, nursing, and so forth. So I was a bit of an odd man out in some respects there. I certainly did as many sandbags as the next guy. In the end, those are the kinds of things that have to be done. I’d say I got along well enough with the people in my unit. They were probably a lot different than me. I don’t remember anyone else from Ohio being in the unit I was in. In a situation like that, everyone comes together, and you don’t really focus on the differences so much as you do on we’re all in this together, and we need to get the mission done.
S: Afterwards then, did you use the GI Bill to get—?
K: I did. I got out of the military in June of 1992 and then started college at Bowling Green State University that fall. I had invested in the GI Bill at that time. It did not pay the college bills, but it certainly helped substantially with it. So I did take advantage of that, while I was at Bowling Green.
S: What was your area of concentration or major?
K: I had a double major at Bowling Green in public relations and political science. So journalism with a specialization in public relations, and political science.
S: Did you get this job right after?
K: No, I graduated in 1996, and then I moved to Columbus afterward. I actually worked in several different positions doing things in the government relations area. I worked for a member of congress for a couple of years here in Columbus. A couple of other non-profit organizations. I began working here in the Ohio Historical Society in December of 2004, so I've been here more than five years.
S: So just reflecting back, how would you say that your service from ’88-’92 and experiences affected your life to this point?
K: Oh boy, it affected my life profoundly. It’s interesting to think of what path I may have taken if I decided not to humor the recruiter in 1988 and if I just said, “I’m not interested. Good bye.” At that point, I really hadn’t done a very good job of preparing myself for what to do after high school. I was having fun, but you know, I had pretty good grades, but I thought I was interested in Bowling Green. Yet I wasn’t sure if I could accomplish that financially. So I was just at a place where I wasn’t sure. It’s just interesting to wonder what different path I might have taken. As I look back, I think, “Boy, it affected me profoundly.” A lot of lessons learned; I think I referenced earlier where I saw some examples of how to do something the right way and how to not go about doing something. The military may be somewhat different now than it was twenty years ago, but I remember specifically not being enamored with the thought that you are really saluting a uniform. There were a lot of things in the military where they depersonalize the people. It’s “We need a body.” It’s “We need somebody at this rank who has the qualifications.” There were a lot of things that run counter to my own personal perspective, where I think the individual is much more important. That just made a big impression on me, so when I got out of the military, I had a good experience overall, but as I look back on it, I think it really taught me to really emphasize the personalization. I didn’t really agree with depersonalizing. That’s one thing that sticks out in my mind—that I was determined to not think of things in a depersonalized approach. But as I said, I had a good experience overall. I'm glad I did what I did because I think it really shaped me after that, even to the minor things of it really made me a morning person, for example. I had to wake up early most days, and to this day, I'm very much a morning person. Paying attention to details is something I very much learned in the military. I like to think I pay pretty good attention to detail these days. Some people would debate that. Overall, a good experience. I'm glad I did learn those skills: the journalism, photography, attention to detail. And it was such a radical change from what I was doing when I was eighteen years old. It really positioned me for success later. Another good example I didn’t mention was while I was at Bowling Green, I was a little bit older than the normal college student—I mean, just by a couple of years—but I was very interested in politics, and at that time, there was a student on the Bowling Green City Council. There was a ward that was mostly BGSU students, and he said, “You know, I'm not running for reelection next year. With your military service and background and your interest in politics, you really ought to think about that.” And I did. I had the political bug for sure. So in 1993, I ran for and was elected to a term on the Bowling Green City Council, which was a huge educational experience in it of itself. That was a close three-way race for that seat. I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t have the military experience, and kind of had some life lessons at that point in time. I was twenty-three at that point. So that really positioned me to have accomplished a couple of important things by my early twenties that I would not have done had I not joined the military. As I said, public service is very important to me, so having served in the military, having deployed to Desert Storm, having served a term as an elected official—those are things I can look back now, even though those were quite a few years ago, very proud of that. I think it really did cement for me the importance of public service, being involved in the community, civic engagement. All those things are very important to me today, and I think it’s because of those experiences early on.
S: Is there any one story that you think you might plan on sharing with your children or grandchildren or nieces or nephews in the future, or now?
K: About the military experience?
S: Yeah.
K: Certainly there are a few things that stand out. I don’t know if they would make for very entertaining stories or not. I keep referencing the driving into combat in the yellow school bus; that’s one that kind of stands out to me. Boy, I don’t know. I really do think that sometimes, like I mentioned, when I first went to basic training, I thought I made a huge mistake. Oh, especially those first few days. I’ll admit; I cried the first couple of days. I thought I made the biggest mistake of my life. Of course, I was eighteen at the time. I thought, “What have I gotten myself into? I am not going to get through this. Boy, what have I done?” I think sometimes you just have to do a radical change. For me, I think where I was at that point in time told me I need to do something totally different. And having endured and gone through what I thought was a terrible mistake, it wasn’t terribly long before I realized, I think I did the right thing here. They're life lessons. I don’t know if a particular humor story sticks out, but I think just what life deals you and the cards you're dealt and taking advantage of it. I could have continued to think of myself as a victim in basic training, and “Woe is me”, and “Boy, didn’t I screw this up?” And I'm glad. I probably wouldn’t choose to go through basic training again, but I think despite what I thought at the time, I am able to look back now and say it was the right thing to do. I do have a daughter; right now, she’s only seventeen months old, but in the future, I think I can talk about some of these experiences and say, “Sometimes you think you’re on the short end of the stick on something, but hang in there. I think you’ll find that there are more opportunities out there than probably you realize right now.”
S: Is there anything else that you can think of that I haven’t covered that you might want to say or add?
K: I don’t think so other than, one thing I didn’t really talk much about. When I got back from Desert Storm, I came back to Fort Hood, Texas. I wanted to continue to get more out of my military experience. I was supposed to be in the army for a five year enlistment. When I got back from Desert Storm, I had probably been in about two and half years—so roughly halfway through my enlistment. Well, I did a stateside swap with someone. There was someone who was at Fort Lewis, Washington who wanted to be in Texas because he was from Texas. I thought, “You know, yeah. Let’s do something different.” We both got approval through our units to switch. They call it a stateside swap. So I went to Fort Lewis, Washington. He took my place at Fort Hood, Texas. I finished my time in the military at Fort Lewis, Washington, which was totally different. Vast different part of the country—the northwest corner of the country, and I really enjoyed being there. As it turned out, because of the end of the Cold War, Desert Storm having ended successfully, the military was making big cutbacks at that time, so they said, “If you’ve been in for at least three years, you can essentially pick a date, and if your unit approves, you can get out of the military early,” so I decided I wanted to do that because I’d been in, at that time, more than three years, I’d been to war, I was now stationed at my second military installation. I thought, “You know, I don’t think I'm going to get a whole lot more out of these next two years.” It ended up being an ideal situation for me. I got out very close to my twenty-second birthday, and I could start college that fall. My military service ended up very much on a high note where I was able to dictate the circumstances with how I ended my service. So that was a real positive thing, and I could start college having had a couple of years’ experience working as a journalist. I think that really positioned me for success in the future. I'm pretty pleased with how that all worked out. It was good.
S: Is there anything else you want to add about yourself, about your experiences?
K: I don’t think so.
S: I guess we’re finished. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
K: Sure, sure.